Linux Configuration and Installation, Second Edition

Linux Configuration and Installation is a book/2-CD package that includes the Linux 2.0.0 kernel, the Slackware 96 distribution, numerous games, utilities and programs.

Author: Patrick Volkerding, Kevin Reichard, Eric F.
Johnson

Publisher: MIS: Press

Pages: 522

Price: $39.95

ISBN: 1-55828-492-3

Reviewer: Harvey Friedman

The obvious question that a potentially interested reader
might have when seeing a second edition of a useful book is “What
are the changes and have they improved on the first
edition?”

Linux Configuration and Installation is
a book/2-CD package that includes the Linux 2.0.0 kernel, the
Slackware 96 distribution, numerous games, utilities and
programs.

The general outline of the book is the same as in the first
edition; that is, it includes sections on “Linux Installation
& Configuration”, “Using Linux”, “Linux Communications and
Networking” and “Linux Programming”. However, the chapters
within these sections have been revised extensively, both in order
and content.

The first section, “Linux Installation &
Configuration”, contains three chapters. Chapter 1, Linux and PC
Hardware, is roughly the same with some newer hardware covered.
Chapter 2, Installing Linux, is largely revised with an emphasis on
an MS-DOS or Windows-based installation. A new feature is a section
on starting Linux from Windows 95, but since I refuse to use
Windows 95, I can't comment on whether this option works. There is
also a section on upgrading from a previous version of Linux. In
essence, the author recommends removing the old version entirely,
particularly if you are going from a.out to ELF. I did this but
failed to realize that the new version took much more space for the
same packages; thus, my 120MB partition filled before the packages
had all been installed. I had to repartition my disk before the new
version would install properly. I think it would have been helpful
to have the expanded size of all the Slackware disk sets listed, so
that partition size could be better estimated. Chapter 3,
Installing and Configuring XFree86, does a fairly good job of
explaining X. The text describes in detail how to use xf86config
without indicating its location; a less experienced user would
probably not know to look for it in the /usr/x11/bin directory.
This chapter was both 3 and 4 in the first edition.

The second section of the book, “Using Linux”, contains
chapters 4 through 6. Chapter 4, Basic Linux Tools, is pretty much
the same as Chapter 5 of the first edition.. Chapter 5, Linux
Applications, is an expanded version of the first part of Chapter 7
from the first edition. Included are the introduction to
Ghostscript that Steve Wegener asked for in his review of the first
edition that appeared LJ (Issue 23, March
1996), a discussion of Mtools for MS-DOS file systems, some X
applications and emulators for various older computers including
DOSEMU 0.60.4. Chapter 6, Basic Linux System Administration,
expands on the material in the last part of Chapter 7 from the
first edition. It is well written and draws upon other Unix
writings of Reichard and Johnson.

Section 3, “Linux Communications and Networking”, contains
Chapters 7 through 9. Chapter 7, Linux and Telecommunications, was
part of chapter 8 in the first edition and deals with serial
communications using seyon, minicom, xminicom and rzsz. It is a
short, 13-page chapter. Chapter 8, Linux Networking, is an even
shorter 5-page chapter covering TCP/IP. It is assumed that the
computer is directly cabled to the network via an Ethernet card.
Chapter 9, Linux and the Internet, covers dial-up IP connections,
electronic mail, the World Wide Web and web browsers, UUCP, FTP,
telnet and Usenet newsgroups. I think that the discussion of
dial-up IP would have fit better into Chapter 7.

Finally we have Section 4, “Linux Programming”, which
consists of one chapter, Chapter 10, Programming in Linux. This
appears to be the same Chapter 10 from the first edition. It is
replete with short examples and simple explanations for many tools,
including cc, make, LessTif, Tcl/Tk, Perl, gawk, etc.

There are two CD-ROMs included with the book, but the page
describing the contents of each is missing quite a bit. There is
almost no description (it stops after a few words of a sentence) of
what is on the first CD (it's a fairly standard Slackware 96);
however, there is a decent description of the second. The directory
of the first one is shown in Listing
1.

To quote the page for the second one, “The second CD-ROM
contains useful source code (and in some cases, precompiled
binaries) for Linux/UNIX applications and utilities mentioned in
the book, as well as selected archives from sunsite and tsx-11”.
Some of the more interesting programs included, in the order of the
page listing, are diald, slirp, several email handlers, WINE and
NTFS, POV-ray, several multimedia and/or image processing programs,
networking packages including Apache and Samba, office packages,
LessTif, Mesa, Java, Perl-5.002, applications, xwatch and other
window-managers.

This book/CD-ROM combination is a definite improvement over
the first edition, offering more information and better
explanations. One further addition that I think would improve the
product considerably relates to a sentence on page 243: “As a
matter of fact, when you installed Linux, you unwittingly set up
dozens of linked files...”--unwittingly is problematic. Having a
list of all the links, particularly non-standard ones belonging to
other Unices, and a list of important files in non-standard
locations would make it much easier for experienced Unix users to
recommend Slackware as highly as other distributions.

All in all though, if one intends to use Slackware 96,
particularly with no previous Unix or Linux experience, this
book/CD-ROM is the one to buy.

Harvey Friedman
is a computer consultant at the
University of Washington, functioning either as system
administrator or statistical analyst. Currently his work requires
data analysis using SAS on large datasets. He doesn't spend as much
of his leisure time as he'd like playing with Linux, because
orienteering, the sport of navigation, is so much fun. He feels
going from staring at a computer screen to moving oneself through
the forest is a great way to retain sanity. He can be reached via
e-mail at fnharvey@u.washington.edu.